Somewhere at the core of Al Olender’s new album Easy Crier is the important of attention. Attention to love. Attention to grief. Attention to memory. Attention to the infinitesimal moments of life as much as the impossibly cavernous ones that swallow us. She doesn’t strive to offer answers or even understanding; she simply uses the truest gift of an artist – to observe what so many of us fail to recognize.
Olender fixes her attention on hard topics, challenging herself and the listener with the kind of honesty we often find it easiest to avoid. The catalyst for Easy Crier was the unexpected and sudden loss of her older brother, and that air of grief suffuses many of the songs; and yet, she finds a kind of gentle clarity throughout, exploring herself, her relationship to the world, and her relationship with her brother. At times, it calls to mind the sharp, honest, and almost-humorous qualities of Joan Didion’s reflections on loss.
Listen to “Keith”, an almost-pop song that paces faster and faster like a rising heartbeat as Olender explores her memories. The drumbeat mimics the way we think and feel as we remember something gone-yet-not-gone in the immediate stages of grief – when it still hurts deep in our guts and quickens our hearts – and yet, as she does through much of the album, Olender lends a little laugh by telling the story of a new tattoo at the funeral. Darkly comic and almost surreal, but absolutely real.
Olender recorded Easy Crier with James Felice (of The Felice Brothers) at The Church in Harlemville, NY. Felice also played keyboard, accordion, and piano, while also enlisting his brother Ian Felice on guitar and Jesske Hume on bass. The band behind Olender lent itself quickly to the tensions between the delicate and the explosive, many of the songs gradually rising into the anthemic. These are songs that alternately destroy and uplift.
Easy Crier begins with “All I Do Is Watch TV”, in which Olender sings about the early stages of losing someone you love. The melody repeats, and she channels the observational and confessional similarly to Courtney Barnett, such as with lines like, “I read a book on grief / it told me to lay in bed” or when she sings about watching true crime and drinking a Big Gulp. To anyone who’s slipped into the shadows of grief or depression, this is a familiar thing – to lose oneself in loneliness and the near-nothingness of daily existence when the world feels cracked apart. We still carry on, finding ways to pass the minutes, the hours, the days, the weeks, the months, and so on. It never gets smaller; it just gets a little lost in time.
And yet, despite all of the obvious themes of grief, this record is not really about death. Its truest themes are openness to living, to loving despite the pain, to holding honesty closely and denying the lies we tell ourselves (while acknowledging that those lies served and serve a purpose). So much of the openness is carried as much by how Olender sings as what she sings; throughout, her voice can be tender and almost-broken (such as on the gutpunching “Liar, Liar” the album closer, “Mean”, with its heartwrenching and repeated, “I’m older than my older brother, but not old enough”), loud and anthemic (“Keith” and “The Age”), and always familiar. The band accents her singing neatly, the keys and drums kicking in to emphasize heartbeats, anxieties, big and little joys, and sometimes pushing Olender to lift her voice a little more.
Ultimately, Easy Crier is a record of quiet revelation about the bracing beauty of a lived life. Everything we do is part of that life; Olender explores what it means to be alive even when we’re not.
Please go see her and her band when they come through. These songs will bloom even more live. Tour dates and merch can be found here.
